Tim James: On storing (when not drinking) wine

A kitchen with an integrated wine fridge. Picture: Gaggenau.

Storing wine – especially storing my own wine – has been on my mind for the past week. First, the arrival of something approaching spring reminded me that before it gets too hot, I need to empty and repack my increasingly inconsistent wine fridges. When the slots are all individual, it is quite inevitable that an available slot will have to be filled by a bottle which has little in common with its neighbours. It would take an incredibly more rigorous degree of self-discipline than mine to keep perfect records.

The rush to reconfigure is due to the fact that my three main refrigerators are at the end of my garage; it gets hot in there in the summer and in moving them I prefer not to expose the bottles too much to that, after their coldly pampered existence. Incidentally, this heat also means, as I have come to realize, that my electricity bill is much higher in the summer than in the winter; Since I have a woodstove in the house, my air conditioning expenses in hot weather are what matter the most.

Second reminder, also on the cost side, is that I received my quarterly storage bill from Wine Cellar in Observatory. R2722.69 for 230 bottles for three months! That’s over ten thousand dollars for the year! It’s too much, and I have to get out more of my wine, or else get rid of it. Drinking it is a real option of course, and I do my best, but I must have about 750 bottles in various places, and that’s actually too much, given my drinking habits and some emotional antipathy for storing things (I’m a chucker rather than a horder, to invoke one of the most useful differences that characterize humanity, in my experience). Wine Cellar’s storage and service is excellent, and I have no complaints except that it seems overpriced. More expensive than I like, anyway.

Third, I had lunch on Friday, with my usual partner John. (We walked away from our current favourite, Table Seven in Salt River, and went to the perhaps even smaller Belly of the Beast on the gritty edge of central Cape Town: we thoroughly enjoyed the excellent food but relatively unrefined and the style of the place, although I think they could exploit the joys of vegetables more – despite their name.) My mate was telling me more about it about the spiral wine cellar he has had it sunk/built under his house, at the cost of something not hugely under half a thousand – and that’s without air conditioning, which he hopes will prove unnecessary.

It makes me envious, sure, but it’s so out of my league that, well, not too much. Either way, I’m going to have to continue with my messy and hazy storage (and by no means free – have you checked the cost of wine fridges recently?). A few bottles at home (not quite in the fridges); some in a professional warehouse. I also keep some in the air-conditioned space of a Hospitaller Angela Lloyd; but having it there isn’t entirely satisfying either.

It’s an expensive business, decent wine storage, which is depressing after you’ve already gone through the expense of buying that damn thing in the first place, convinced it’ll pay off the high premium by aging favorably for five, ten or twenty years – at additional cost. Of course, with significantly expensive wines (decent burgundy and bordeaux for an obvious example, but also at Sadie’s and Kanonkop’s), the cost of storage is a tiny part of the whole business, and if one reasons in terms of “investment” they could be recouped – as the sellers of the local wine auctions, which continue to flourish, have happily discovered. Reputable auctioneers (like Strauss) want to be sure that storage has been good before accepting wine for sale.

Reducing the total number of bottles I worry about is a huge possibility – and there are actually quite a few that I think really need to be drunk or sold: I have, for example, too many Sadie’s whites and others that are over 10 years old that I’m worried about in their experience, and many others approaching that age (I always drink less white wine than I buy).

And there is another rather obvious strategy. Cool, still, dark conditions are essential if wine is to mature properly for, say, 15 or 20 years (my oldest bottles, aside from a single 1966 GS, are Paul Sauer and Welgemeend from the late 1990s and early 2000s Columella, which I think are still going strong). But if you’re only storing wines for about five years from vintage – even longer when they’re fairly robust – keeping them in a relatively cool cabinet is perfectly fine. They’ll probably grow a bit faster than if they were in a Scottish castle keep, but that’s probably an advantage anyway. So now to find storage space. And stop acquiring.

  • Tim James is one of South Africa’s leading wine commentators, contributing to various local and international wine publications. He is a taster (and associate editor) for Platter’s. His book Wines of South Africa – Tradition and Revolution was published in 2013.

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